Monday, February 7, 2011

Mozart Effect

The Mozart Effect has been very popular in recent years. According to gsb.stanford.edu the Mozart Effect has been discredited. However, it still is rather successful in the marketplace. People still believe that listening to Mozart will make you smarter. Nevertheless many people believe that listing to music will increase your babies intelligence.The original 1993 study stated that the college students had temporary increased spatial reasoning. This was found during a specific task for a single sonata. Also according to gsb.stanford in 1999 a dozen consecutive studies failed to replicate the result. So why is a study that found a slight result for college student, and was then discredited being market to babies? To make money, plain and simple. So why is the Mozart effect remaining rather popular if it has been discredited? Due to the simple fact that people are worried about their children's education. I mean no one wants a stupid uneducated child. So if you could just listen to Mozart and get a little smarter then that would be great. However, according to www.livescience.com intelligence is measured by how efficiently information travels through the brain. So how could listening to music increase your ability to efficiently transport information through the brain. Live science does state that new techniques are identifying how intelligence works. They also state that imaging techniques are identifying the stations of the brain that intelligence information uses. Once we better understand this, treatments and ways to increase your IQ might actually be possible. Actually according to gsb.stanford.edu, they will give mothers Mozart Cd's after giving birth. Or in some states it is a law for child care centers to play Mozart.. That seems a little absurd to make it a law in some areas to pay Mozart. Especially when it is proven that the Mozart effect has little to no effect. Gsb.Stanford.edu also stated that the areas where the Mozart effect got the most press were areas where the education system was poor. This just seems like a study that was taken out of hand and blown out of proportion and is being used as a marketing scam. Another interesting development surrounding the Mozart effect is that according to http://www.11alive.com/rss/rss_story.aspx?storyid=136754 Disney is offering a full refund for baby Einstein DVDs produced from 2004 -2009. This is due to the simple fact that it was proven that they do not work. They were advertised to increase a child's intelligence, however they do not. They are still a decent child's program, however they probably wont make your child into Einstein. You probably would not want that anyway, Einstein could not talk fluently until he was 9.

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Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

The popular media and self-help industry is rife with extraordinary claims. Alien experimentation, psychic detectives, mediums, ESP, extreme therapies and miracle products are all examples of how pseudoscience and the paranormal have become prevalent, popular and even an extremely lucrative enterprise. The majority of these examples defy the basic laws of science, logic and common sense yet they appeal to a large number of people. Here we will use science, specifically a psychological perspective to explore these popular theories and claims, and learn to think critically in order to be able to constructively evaluate them.